This morning the folks over at AOL, and more specifically the AIM team, launched version 7 of AIM Express. And guess what, it is built using Flash! It really is a great experience and a quality example of the power of ActionScript 3.

What is most interesting to me though is not the client, but the API that they have made available to ActionScript developers. You can go to Google Code and actually use the same base AIM AS3 library to build your own client or integrate AIM functionality into your application! If you know anything about my history with the AIM client and Central, you will know how excited I am about this.

When it comes to building applications that have chat, presence, or some type of collaborative functionality, you have to consider the infrastructure it might take to get up and running. With this library, all you have to do is build your client, and let the user utilize their existing AIM/ICQ account! And guess what, I am sure most of them already have one of those…